The evidential support theory of conditionals

Abstract

According to so-called epistemic theories of conditionals, the assertability/ acceptability/acceptance of a conditional requires the existence of an epistemically significant relation between the conditional's antecedent and its consequent. This paper points to some linguistic data that our current best theories of the foregoing type appear unable to explain. Further, it presents a new theory of the same type that does not have that shortcoming. The theory is then defended against some seemingly obvious objections.Keywords Conditionals · Probability · Semantics · Bayesian epistemology According to so-called epistemic theories of conditionals, the assertability/acceptability/acceptance of a conditional requires the existence of an epistemically relevant relation between the conditional's antecedent and its consequent. It is the working hypothesis of this paper that some such theory is correct at least for indicative conditionals. However, below I will point to some linguistic data that our current best epistemic theories of conditionals appear unable to explain. I further present a new theory of the same type that does not have that shortcoming and that also seems to withstand further scrutiny.As a preliminary point, I should note that the present paper's main focus will be on simple indicative conditionals, that is, indicative conditionals the antecedents and consequents of which do not contain conditionals, and then chiefly on the assertability/ acceptability conditions of those conditionals, and not so much on their truth conditions (if they have any). Also, I will leave compounds of conditionals undiscussed. This is not much of an omission if those are right who have argued that a substantial part of the embedded conditionals we encounter in daily speech can be reduced to I. Douven (B)

Ranking Theory and Conditional Reasoning

“…Thus, these constructions hold the promise of making the old idea precise that conditionals codify inferential relations and that the antecedent can be seen as a reason for the consequent in central applications of conditionals. As such, the ranking theoretic approach to conditionals finds itself in continuity with Ryle (), Rott (), Strawson (), Brandom (), Douven (, ), and Krzyżanowska (). A guiding idea of this tradition is that it constitutes a semantic defect when the antecedent of a conditional is irrelevant to the consequent, as in Edgington's (, p. 267) example: “If Napoleon is dead, Oxford is in England.” In contrast, other accounts will have to set such infelicities aside as pragmatic phenomena that arise due to violations of Gricean norms of informative conversations.…”

“…For our purposes, it is moreover pleasing to note that what is being estimated is the conditional probability that the dependent variable takes a particular value. The model is thereby able to come into contact with: (i) approaches to conditionals that emphasize probability raising (Douven, , ; Spohn, ), which focuses on the relationship between P ( C ¦ A ) and P(C¦), and (ii) the suppositional theory of conditionals (Evans & Over, ), which takes P (if A , C ) = P ( C ¦ A ) as its point of departure . To simplify the calculations, Eq.…”

Causal Conditionals, Tendency Causal Claims and Statistical Relevance

“…Figure 2 gives a schematic representation of the relationship between the different variables in our model, adding a latent variable that expresses the part of the causal classification judgment that cannot be reduced to statistical relevance, or other probabilistic predictors. All in all, this account resembles Igor Douven's Evidential Support Theory (Douven 2008(Douven , 2016; Douven and Verbrugge 2012) and more recent developments along these lines (Crupi and Iacona 2019), and it provides empirical support for these research programs. Our account is different in that the explicit consideration of a causal component adds a "semantic" component which is absent in those proposals.…”

The Lottery Paradox and the Pragmatics of Belief

“…As a more general remark, I should like to add that the fact that the hypothesis of a pragmatics of belief helps us to solve the Lottery Paradox by ruling lottery propositions not rationally credible – as I will argue in the following – in its turn provides some support for that hypothesis. Additional support of much the same kind comes from the fact that the hypothesis helps us to answer certain questions regarding the pragmatics of indicative conditionals (Douven ) as well as questions regarding the relationship between theories of justification and our epistemic goal (Douven ). Nonetheless, it seems to me that the hypothesis is no less amenable to empirical confirmation (or disconfirmation, as the case may be) than are many other hypotheses about the relationship between language and thought that experimental psychologists have been able to tackle successfully in the past two decades or so .…”